The thought occurred to me recently to check how many people die each day on earth. It’s impossible to be 100% accurate, but basically around 150,000 people die around the world every day, around 6,000 per hour. Every day is the last day on earth for a group of people as large as the population of Kansas City. Over a million people “shuffle off this mortal coil” every week.
My fraternity brother from college committed suicide seven years ago. He was just entering the prime of his life at 20. The details of his death and mental state at the time of his decision aside, he had a favorite saying that stuck with me: “There are 86,400 seconds in a day, how will you live them?” A well known Bible verse along the same lines states: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13)
Moreso than anything else in recent memory, the thought that today or tomorrow might be my last day on earth, like it is for tens of thousands of others, inspired a strong sense of urgency in me. Though I’m just 32 and it’s likely that I’ll live for decades to come, I’ll never really know until it happens, right?
Many people like to say that you should live every day as if it were your last. I never liked this saying because if we truly knew today was are last day on earth, we probably wouldn’t go to work, run boring or annoying errands and spend time with people we disliked. A more realistic way of looking at things is to try and squeeze the most that you can out of every day, living according to our values and goals in life.
Perhaps a more interesting thought experiment is to imagine knowing that you have exactly 50 years left to live. While it seems like a lot of time, I can attest to the fact that our perception of time changes rapidly as we age and what seemed like an eternity to us as children and adolescents appears more like a deep breath and several blinks of the eye and years have passed. As we accumulate experiences we begin to see how much living can be fit into a given period of time and how things that seemed so permanent (relationships, relatives, jobs) can slip out of our lives forever.
It seems like just months ago I was freshly-arrived in Poland after leaving California and ready to take on the world. Its been 20 months since then and I have to admit that the enthusiasm I came with has faded dramatically and now it seems like I am finally getting a more mature perspective on adult life after a slog of experience compressed into a few short years.
I’ve come to understand that the lessons learned from the experiences we have sometimes take a lot of time to reveal themselves and the individual experiences aren’t learned from in isolation, but only as we continue relating them to evolving circumstances in our lives.
What seemed so clear about a failed relationship in the weeks or months after the breakup can take on a different character a year or more later. The reasons we gave for making major life decisions may seem trivial to us now. It doesn’t negate the fact that our best information up to that point required us to make the decisions and deal with the consequences. There’s no better teacher than being burned by a hot stove. The lesson learned though doesn’t mean that the pain every goes away completely. Sometimes we have to look at our scars to remember how they got there. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. They may fade or they may fester depending on the mindset we have and the actions we take after the irreversible damage has been done.
To be continued…
